Water

By Ashley Southall and Timothy Williams / New York Times Nearly 200,000 people in Charleston, W.Va., and nine surrounding counties were without drinking water on Friday after a chemical spill contaminated supplies, the West Virginia governor’s office said. Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin said early Friday in a statement that the federal government had approved a request of assistance in dealing with the chemical spill into the Elk River, which flows into the Kanawha River at Charleston. ...

By Michigan Coalition Against Tar Sands (MI-CATS) BATTLE CREEK, Noon, on December 13th: After activist and Kalamazoo resident Chris Wahmhoff’s felony pretrial, Michigan Coalition Against Tar Sands (MI-CATS) will hold a press conference to raise awareness about chemical oil dispersants found in the Kalamazoo River. Earlier this year Chris protested Enbridge Energy by skateboarding into their pipeline and stopping construction. He was charged with resisting and obstructing an officer and faces 2 years in prison. ...

By Amazon Watch In a major setback for Chevron, the Ecuadorian National Court issued its long-awaited decision in favor of a $9 billion pollution judgment against Chevron upholding and affirming lower court rulings. The court’s decision is final. In its 222-page opinion, the supreme court affirmed earlier decisions by a Lago Agrio court and the appellate court for $9 billion but rejected the additional $9 billion in punitive damages previously imposed for not apologizing, given that provision is not explicitly permitted in Ecuadorian law. The supreme court also lamented the plaintiffs waiting 20 years for justice and attributed this largely to delaying tactics by Chevron. This ruling constitutes a landmark case for corporate responsibility. ...

By Confederated Tribes of the Goshute Reservation On Saturday, May 4, 2013, approximately 70 Native Americans representing the Confederated Tribes of the Goshute Reservation, Wells Colony, Elko/TeMoke Tribe, Battle Mountain and Yomba Shoshone along with Tribal members from the Northern Ute, Cheyenne-Arapaho, Navajo, Cherokee and non-natives begin a Walk/Run from Wells, Nevada towards Caliente, Nevada, a distance of approximately 272 miles. After a blessing and prayer for the water, the group began the long trek walking and running on U.S. 93 towards Ely, Nevada. ...

By Max Wilbert / Deep Green Resistance Great Basin On April 19th, myself and other organizers from the Salt Lake City community attended the Morning Energy Update, a meeting hosted by the Utah State Office of Energy Development. The meeting was held in a small conference room at the World Trade Center Utah building. The room was full - us five or six activists mixed in with energy industry businesspeople, State and County officials, and one or two journalists. I sat next to Cody Stewart, the energy advisor to Gary Herbert, the Governor of the State of Utah. ...

By Robin Oisín Llewellyn / Mongabay On hot days the broken stone and dried up silt from the San Sebastian mine in Eastern El Salvador bake in the sun. The slew of refuse is freckled with rock stained bright blue with cyanide, open to the elements that on rainier days will wash it downhill into the Rio San Sebastian below. The openings of passages into the mine dot the mountainside, and further downhill a bright orange stream with a chemical stench flows into another. The American Commerce Group ceased operating here in 1999 but sought to return when the price of gold began its current escalation. After a Centre for Investigation of Investment and Commerce study found the local river to be 100,000 times more acidic than the area’s uncontaminated water, and cyanide levels to be ten times above safe levels, Commerce Group’s environmental permit was revoked. The company is subsequently suing the Salvadoran government for $100 million through the Central American Free Trade Agreement. ...

By Melanie Jae Martin / Waging Nonviolence Last week, a new front opened in the struggle against tar sands mining in the U.S. If you didn’t know that tar sands mining is in the works on this side of the border in the first place, you’re not alone. Most people don’t realize that tar sands extraction, which has caused tremendous pollution and environmental degradation in Canada, has crossed the border to U.S. soil, where it has taken root in Utah. ...

By US Geological Survey From 1900-2010, freshwater fish species in North America went extinct at a rate 877 times faster than the rate found in the fossil record, while estimates indicate the rate may double between now and 2050. This new information comes from a U.S. Geological Survey study to be published in the September issue of the journal BioScience. In the fossil record, one freshwater fish species goes extinct every 3 million years, but North America lost 39 species and 18 subspecies between 1898 and 2006. Based on current trends in threatened and endangered fish species, researchers estimate that an additional 53-86 species of freshwater fish may be extinct by the year 2050. Since the first assessment of extinct North American freshwater fishes in 1989, the number of extinct fishes increased by 25 percent. ...

By Steve Mufson / The Washington Post Jane Kleeb is a savvy activist who, Nebraska’s Republican governor once said, “has a tendency to shoot her mouth off most days.” A Florida native who moved to Nebraska in 2007 after marrying a rancher active in Democratic politics, she did as much as anyone to bring the massive Keystone XL crude oil pipeline to a halt last year. James Goecke is a counterpoint to Kleeb. A hydrogeologist and professor emeritus at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, he has been measuring water tables in Nebraska’s ecologically sensitive Sand Hills region since 1970 and has shunned the political limelight — until now. He recently appeared in an ad for the pipeline’s owner, TransCanada, rebutting some of the arguments against the project and its new route. ...

By Peter Rugh / Waging Nonviolence The war came home this weekend, as thousands of people whose land has been under siege by the U.S. government and corporate interests gathered in Washington, D.C. No, they weren’t victims of drone attacks or 10-plus years of fighting in Afghanistan. They were ordinary Americans, whose neighborhoods, townships and states have been struggling to put an end to fracking, a destructive form of natural gas drilling. ...